A large majority of Canadians that responded to a federal consultation on medical assistance in dying (MAiD) supported expanding access to patients suffering from dementia, according to new documents tabled in the House.

The Liberal government, however, did not heed that request and introduced less expansive changes to the MAiD framework earlier this year, in hopes of quickly passing court-mandated amendments to the existing law.

Documents provided to MPs in April contained the results of the more than 300,000 online submissions that were made to the Department of Justice as part of the consultation it conducted in January on how the MAiD eligibility should be revised.

About four out of five respondents – 235,838 in total or 79.4 per cent, to be precise – said they supported people with dementia-causing diseases like Alzheimer’s arranging to have a medically assisted death prior to losing their decision-making capacity.

“Many felt that is is important for people to have the option to make an advance request. They felt that if a person went through the steps to make an advance request and then lost the capacity to give final consent due to their condition deteriorating, they should be able to proceed, as long as they are not expressing fear or resistance immediately prior to the procedure,” the department’s What We Heard report says.

The report was published in mid-March, around the peak of COVID-19 pandemonium. It was largely ignored by the media at a time when national attention was almost exclusively focused on the pandemic.

Slightly more people who responded to the online consultation showed support for dementia patients than did for those whose cases would qualify them for a life-ending procedure under the changes put to Parliament in late February. In the proposed law, known as Bill C-7, the Liberals are trying to eliminate the need for some patients to give consent at a second occasion, which currently is required for all patients just before the procedure takes place.

The federal minister championing the bill, David Lametti, has called the changes the “Audrey Parker amendment” after its namesake who elected for a medically assisted death earlier than she wanted out of fear that she would eventually lose the ability to consent before she was able to have the procedure carried through with. Parker had breast cancer that spread to her bones and brain, which led her to fear that she would someday lose the stable mind required to prove she was willing to receive the drugs that would put her to sleep for a final time.

Patients that C-7 would qualify must still be facing a “reasonably foreseeable” death, which someone suffering from dementia and not sick with a terminal illness would not qualify to be.

In the government’s consultations, 78.6 per cent of respondents (235,838 in total), said they thought that someone should still be able to qualify for a medically-assisted death if they’re found to meet the required criteria but lose the capacity to make health care decisions a few days before the procedure.

(iPolitics only recently obtained the documents from the Library of Parliament, which usually makes files like them available to journalists within days of them being tabled. The results of the medically-assisted dying consultations were delayed being sent because of emergency measures taken by Parliament’s library to ensure its workers weren’t being put at a higher risk of contracting COVID-19.)

Modifying the “reasonably foreseeable” criteria had been the government’s intention when it introduced its legislation to amend medically assisted dying laws, as it was in a race against time to make changes required by Quebec’s top court.

Christine Baudouin, a judge in the province’s Superior Court, struct the provision down as unconstitutional in a September case involving two people suffering from severe disabilities who under the existing framework could not access medically-assisted deaths. The federal government had until March 11 to fix the laws or else separate systems would exist in Quebec versus the rest of Canada, before Baudouin accepted the a request from Lametti to extend the deadline.

The government now has until July 11 to fix its laws, unless it is given another extension by the court. Quebec’s courts have been functioning in varying degrees of limited capacities since mid-March.

After introducing Bill C-7, Lametti said his government wanted “consensus” before moving ahead on what it’s called complex cases of medical assistance in dying, which includes not just advanced requests like those of dementia patients, but also in the cases of mature minors and where mental illness is someone’s only reason for asking for the life-ending procedure. The laws that were passed that created the existing framework requires for a parliamentary review to be started next month to re-examine its provisions.

Lametti has assured that review will be longer, more extensive and will look at the cases of dementia patients. The online consultations that were conducted earlier this year will help inform the upcoming parliamentary review as well.

The responses about dementia patients seen in the federal government’s online consultations aligns with how Canadians responded to a poll conducted by Ipsos on behalf of the right-to-die organization Dying with Dignity Canada. Data published a few weeks before C-7 was tabled suggested that eight-in-10 Canadians believed that dementia patients should be allowed to make advance requests for a medically-assisted death.

“I know some people are disappointed that we didn’t go that far this time around. But we didn’t feel that we could,” Lametti said in February, one day after presenting Bill C-7 to the House.